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Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Liberal Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2014

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN*
Affiliation:
The George Washington University, Department of History, 801 22nd St. NW, Phillips Hall, Washington, DC 20052, USA; azimmer@gwu.edu
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Extract

Returning to Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization almost two decades after its publication allows us to take stock, from a slight temporal distance, of the reception in our discipline of the work of Michel Foucault. Magnetic Mountain is the one of the books that came out of a project that Kotkin and a number of other students began under Foucault's direction at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 (p. xviii). Foucault's work in California occurred during a particular turn in his political thinking, a moment when he experimented with liberal alternatives to the left theories of the first decades of his career. Kotkin's book is not simply an application of a general Foucauldianism, but rather of a specific California Foucault.

Type
Forum: Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain (1995)
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 225 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Further references to this text will be in parentheses in the text.

2 On variants of Foucault, see Behrent, Michael C., ‘Accidents Happen: François Ewald, the “Antirevolutionary” Foucault, and the Intellectual Politics of the French Welfare State’, The Journal of Modern History, 82, 3 (2010), 585–624CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Behrent does not specify a California Foucault as I do here. It is beyond the scope of this text to investigate every instance of Berkeley Foucauldianism for what I identify as its liberalism. To consider just one other example: Rabinow, Paul similarly separates liberalism out from the social welfare state he studies in French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989)Google Scholar. See, e.g., Ch. 6 ‘From Moralism to Welfare’, 168–210.

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11 Gandal and Kotkin, ‘Foucault in Berkeley’, 6, 15.

12 Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, 209–11.

13 Ibid. 211.

14 Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Senellart, Michel, tr. Burchell, Graham (2004; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 48Google Scholar. Behrent quotes this passage in ‘Accidents Happen’, 599.

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22 The literature on the welfare state is vast. For an especially insightful survey of the German case, see Young-Sun, Hong, ‘Neither Singular nor Alternative: Narratives of Modernity and Welfare in Germany, 1870–1945’, Social History, 30, 2 (2005), 133–53Google Scholar.

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24 von Hayek, Friedrich, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944)Google Scholar.

25 Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the Conservative Party Conference, 10 October 1975. Online at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation http://www.margaretthatcher.org.

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27 Baker, Keith Michael, Condorcet, from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 386Google Scholar. Kotkin cites this work on p. 381 n. 26, noting: ‘The centrality of the Enlightenment and Condorcet for understanding the Russian revolution was impressed upon me by Martin Malia.’ Malia wrote the preface to the English translation of Courtois, Stéphane, ed., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

28 Market socialism, as Johanna Bockman shows, was not conceived as a middle road or hybrid between capitalism and socialism but was rather a genuine attempt at democratic socialism. Bockman, Johanna, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Rodgers discusses the use of new class theory by neo-liberals. This would also be an interesting avenue to explore in relation to Kotkin's text.

30 Djilas, Milovan, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Praeger, 1957), 40Google Scholar. Kotkin discusses Djilas on 341, 394 n. 5, 585 n. 295, and 467 nn.12–13.

31 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 68Google Scholar.

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33 Mitchell, Timothy, ‘How Neoliberalism Makes a World: The Urban Property Project in Peru’, in The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 386–416Google Scholar.

34 For an account of socialism that goes beyond the liberal opposition of market and state, see Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism; Bockman, Johanna, ‘The Long Road to 1989: Neoclassical Economics, Alternative Socialisms, and the Advent of Neoliberalism’, Radical History Review, 112 (2012), 9–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Foucault's, seminar on neo-liberalism has been published as The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Senellart, Michel, tr. Burchell, Graham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)Google Scholar. For a helpful discussion, see Hamann, Trent H., ‘Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics’, Foucault Studies, no. 6 (2009), 37–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See especially Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.